HamsterOS

Window Manager

Full z-order stacking with resizable and draggable windows. Bounded damage redraws on focus changes. Active windows show a navy title bar; inactive windows show dark gray.

Launcher Toolbar

Ten visible slots per page with pagination. 16-colour palette-indexed pixel-art icons with hover raise and pressed-state offset. Slots for FILES, FIND, NOTE, CLOCK, PREFS, CALC, CAL, PAINT, GAMES, APPS, TOOLS, USER, PIANO, and CD Player.

File Browser

Up to 5 spatial windows at once. Icon and list views, sort by Name, Type, Size, or Date, colourful file-type icons, fast .ICO sidecars for apps, copy/paste, rename, delete, new folder, mouse-wheel scrolling, and loading/progress toasts around disk I/O.

Menu Bar

Classic Hamster/File/Edit/Special menu bar always visible. Hover switches open menus; stale pixels clear correctly on close. Alt+H/F/E/S keyboard access.

Run Dialog

Special > Run or Ctrl+R opens typed mounted-drive paths such as A:\DOS\BOULDER.COM, C:\APPS\HAMWRITE.APP, folders, and documents. It uses the same launch routing as File Manager, including VM86 DOS and external .APP loading.

Find Files

Recursive filename search with a dynamic drive selector showing only mounted drives. Click a result to jump the file manager. Light-dismiss on outside click.

Desktop

Dynamic drive icons for mounted floppies, ATA partitions, optical media, and the RAM disk, with 3D bevel selection. Cursor keys select desktop items, Enter opens them, drag positions save to DESKTOP.CFG, and extra HOST/CDROM icons appear as drives mount.

Trash

Delete operations move files and folders into boot-volume /TRASH/ with restore metadata. The desktop Trash icon opens the folder, restores items, or empties hard-deleted contents.

System Fonts

Preferences exposes a classic Font, Style, Size, and Sample picker for three shared bitmap font faces: Wheel, Carrot, and Hamster. Sizes 12/14/16/18 and Regular/Bold/Italic/Bold Italic are used by the shell and external apps.

Screen Savers

Stars (parallax), Flying Hamsters (16-colour animated sprites with bobbing and wing-flap), and Text Bounce. Configurable idle timeout; any input wakes.

System Recovery

CMOS crash counter forces VGA 640x480x16 safe mode after 3 consecutive crashes. I/O stall detection surfaces a nonfatal dialog if the main loop heartbeat stalls over 8 seconds.

Cooperative Multitasking

One lean foreground event loop dispatches queued input, bounded redraws, app update ticks, and kernel_service() yield points so slow disks stay responsive without RAM-heavy preemptive stacks.

Notepad

Load, Save, Save As with FAT file dialog. 4-step undo, Find and Replace, line numbers, live word and character count, Go-to-line, shared plain-text clipboard with HamsterWrite, dirty tracking, and Ctrl+S/F/Z/A/Q shortcuts.

HamsterWrite

A Notepad-derived word-processor base shipped as HAMWRITE.APP. It already has load/save/save-as, dirty close confirmation, scrolling, undo, find/replace, word count, go-to-line, shared text clipboard, mouse wheel, and an I-beam cursor. Native .HWD documents are the next format target.

Help Viewer

HELP.APP opens from F1 or Hamster > Help. It reads structured HELP.HLP topics, shows an index, supports search-by-typing, clickable inline links, keyboard and mouse-wheel scrolling, and back/forward topic history.

HamsterPaint

Full-screen 16-colour BMP editor. Pencil, fill bucket, line, rectangle, ellipse, eraser, selectable regions, cut/copy/paste, Ctrl+Z undo, Ctrl+S save, and 1x/2x zoom.

Image Viewer

Standalone IMGVIEW.APP opens from the toolbar, launcher, file dialog, or file associations. Images are rendered through the VGA/EGA 16-colour desktop palette.

HamsterPiano

On-screen keyboard. When SoundBlaster 16 is detected, plays OPL3 FM notes and shows a DEMO button for The Entertainer. Falls back to PC speaker square-wave tones otherwise.

CD Audio Player

Red Book audio via Matsushita/MKE ISA CD-ROM or ATAPI. Track listing, elapsed time, play, pause, stop, and skip.

Clock, Calendar, Calculator

RTC-driven analog clock with second hand. Monthly calendar with highlighted current date. Four-function calculator.

Preferences

Control Panel tabs for Desktop, Theme, Mouse, Sound, Display, screen savers, RAM disk, shared fonts, time zone, and direct CMOS time/date editing.

FAT Driver

FAT12/16/32 read/write; ISO-9660 read-only. Safe overwrite writes new data before freeing old clusters. Read-back verify on writes, with bounded cluster scans and yield points for responsiveness.

Disk Copier

Sector-exact floppy copy (A→B, B→A, or A→A single-drive). Single-drive mode auto-calculates passes from available RAM. Progress bar per pass.

Format Tool

Quick FAT12 format of A: or B: with a custom volume label.

Partition Tool

View all 4 MBR partition entries. Blank the first ATA hard disk (full-sector wipe with confirmation). Create one active full-size FAT16 LBA primary partition.

Format Hard Disk

FAT16-formats the first partition on the ATA hard disk. Writes boot sector, FAT tables, and root directory. Remounts on completion.

Boot-Disk Installer

A:\INSTALL\INSTALL.BAT runs from the boot menu's Install Or Upgrade Hamster OS option. It can partition and format a blank disk, copy the OS tree, write DOS-side boot files, run FDISK /MBR and SYS C:, and update HELP.HLP on existing installs.

Storage Registry

FAT sector I/O now routes through a storage registry, so future devices such as SCSI disks can mount without rewriting the FAT layer.

SCSI Diagnostics

SCSIDIAG.APP and a probe-only NCR400.DRV target NEC T130B / NCR 53C400 ISA cards, scanning memory windows and I/O bases for real-hardware bring-up.

SoundBlaster 16

Auto-detected at boot (probes 0x220/0x240/0x260/0x280). 8-bit unsigned mono PCM via ISA DMA channel 1, IRQ5-driven streaming in 48 KB chunks, plus OPL3 FM synthesis for HamsterPiano.

Startup Chime

Retro ascending-bell chime (/STARTUP.WAV, about 22 KB, 11025 Hz, 8-bit mono). Loaded before the desktop draws, played non-blocking, then heap-freed automatically.

Notification Doot

Small soft-bell WAV (/DOOT.WAV, about 4.8 KB, 8 kHz). Used for confirm and notification sounds and kept resident only when Wave Doot mode is active.

Volume Slider

Yellow speaker icon in the header when SB16 is detected. Eight-step slider adjusts SB16 master volume and CD audio input together. Moving the slider plays the doot as audible feedback.

Sound Preferences

Sound settings show SB16 port and IRQ status, offer a PLAY CHIME test, and let users choose Beep, Tone, Wave Doot, or None while keeping floppy-sized WAV guidance explicit.

PC Speaker

PIT channel 2 + port 0x61 gate. Beep, Tone, and None modes cover fallback hardware and quiet setups.